Twitter took to its company blog today to talk about abuse. It's no secret that Twitter has done a less-than-stellar job at preventing abuse on its social network for a while now. In fact, continued harassment on the platform was likely a primary reason companies like Disney neglected to purchase Twitter. Now the company has announced three changes it hopes will more effectively reduce harassment.

Twitter already allows you to mute accounts, which prevents you from seeing their tweets in both the timeline and notifications. Now the feature will allow you to mute keywords, phrases, and entire conversations in your notifications. Twitter developers, if you're reading this, can we get muting keywords/phrases on the timeline as well?

Additionally, Twitter is adding a new category in the Report Tweet screen for messages targeting "people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease." The company explained that this will allow Twitter employees to better process these requests, and everyone wins (except people sending abusive tweets).

Twitter hopes the above changes, in addition to retraining all of their support teams on the company's abuse policies, will put a dent in harassment on the platform. Only time will tell.